Social Negativity, Existential Security, and Subjective Well-Being: A Multilevel Examination of 28 Countries

The objective of this research is to explore the factors associated with subjective well-being in a multi-country context. Specifically, it seeks to advance the literature in the following two ways. First, the analysis focuses on harmful (not beneficial) implications of network ties, or social negativity. Second, and more importantly, this study investigates whether the link between negative ties and well-being varies in magnitude across the level of economic development, i.e., existential security. This paper’s main thesis is that social negativity would be more harmful in the context of greater existential security, where postmaterialist happiness depends on self-expression values such as freedom, autonomy, and agency. To empirically examine this idea, mixed-effects (multilevel) models are estimated using comparative data on 28 high- and low-income countries from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP 2017). This data source provides a wealth of information, especially on social negativity measured with a multi-item scale. Existential security is operationalized using gross domestic product (GDP) and, as a robustness check, human development index (HDI). Controlling for a host of individual and contextual confounders, findings indicate that negative social ties are positively associated with emotional distress but negatively related to life satisfaction. Moreover, the focal relationships become stronger in countries characterized by greater existential security. An important implication is that material progress has an unintended consequence of undermining (postmaterialist) well-being by exacerbating harmful implications of social negativity.